The Kid Rock Cruise: The Bits We Couldn't Fit

You want to make a great television series? Set it on one of these modern cruise ships and focus on the crew. I’m not talking about The Love Boat, I’m talking about the real Upstairs Downstairs vibe you get once you see the inner workings of a floating hotel. Behind the EMPLOYEES ONLY doors is a whole other world. Aboard the Norwegian Pearl, the host ship for Kid Rock’s annual Chillin’ the Most Cruise, there was a corridor nicknamed "I-95" that ran up and down the length of the ship, where employees pushed around food, supplies, garbage, beer, and more beer.

There were hundreds of employees running up and down this highway. About forty percent of them were Filipino. The next biggest group was Indian, and then Indonesians. These are people whose job is to remain as inconspicuous as possible to the drunken throngs roaming the passenger decks. Before you leave the employee areas, there is a sign on the door saying, "You are now in the passenger area, please dress accordingly." They work on short contracts and live in windowless rooms on the boat for months at a time. Imagine living and working on a boat that—apart from two weeks in dry dock once in a blue moon—never stops sailing. You’re spending your life essentially sailing to nowhere, cleaning up the occasional vomit bucket. I can’t even imagine what it’s like to be on that crew, serving passengers who are—culturally speaking—your diametric opposite. None of the nice parts of the ship are intended for you. The passengers above are mere cargo, a thing to be carried back and forth.

There was a pool for crew members on the Pearl, visible only if you peered over the front of one of the top decks. I saw it. It was the size of a Twister mat. There was also, I was told, a crew bar. One of the guys at Sixthman said he ventured down to the crew-only bar one night. The patrons were NOT happy to see a dickhead white boy from the passenger area step into their comfort zone.

And now, here are the copious extras from my five days aboard the Norwegian Pearl:

If you’re planning on going on a rock star cruise (and why wouldn’t you?), I would strongly suggest that you do some research into the company running the cruise before you book your travel. One of the reasons that Kid Rock’s cruise does such boffo business every year is because the company behind it—Sixthman—has a very good reputation. I’m not just saying that because I’m Mr. Big Fancy GQ Pants and they were purposely nice to me. Sixthman kept an office on the boat that was accessible at all times to passengers in need of help, and there were plenty of Sixthman employees running around our ship tending to people in an expedited fashion. One time, they were trying to locate a woman who had been "missing," only to learn that she was sleeping in another dude’s cabin. THAT’S GREAT HUSTLE. Many staffers kept pedometers on them just to see how many miles they walked each day. Five to ten was not unusual.

I even met one passenger in the pisser (I know it sounds weird to meet someone at a urinal but in this alternate redneck universe it seemed quite natural) who went on nothing but Sixthman cruises. He didn’t give a shit about Kid Rock. He just liked a music cruise that was well run. His favorite was the VH1 cruise featuring Train. So there you go.

Also, Sixthman sent me a commemorative cruise patch after I got home. It had an embroidered image of Kid Rock, a chick in a bikini, and a crab smoking a cigar on it. Why is the crab smoking a cigar? I have no idea. But it’s the little things.

For those of you looking to be outraged by the Red State ethos of the Kid Rock cruise, I can offer you a few examples. There was one time when I walked by one white dude saying to another dude, "You’re born here, you’re raised here, you’re American! There is no such thing as African American!" Also, when Kid Rock had a break between songs onstage at Redneck Paradise, he shouted out, to scattered applause, "Seems most of us do our fair share and the rest of us are holding out our hands... The whole government is a giant jackal!" One of the few songs he played during both sets was "Thank God I’m a Country Boy." And then there was the bathroom situation...

At Redneck Paradise Island, the bathroom situation got a bit crowded, especially for the ladies. M any times, women would rush into the men’s room to use the toilet. And they were hazed mercilessly for it. I saw two women come into the men’s room to use the shitter and were greeted immediately by a guy screaming "POP YOUR TOPS, BITCHES!" All of these incidents were followed by nervous laughter. Those girls RAN from the bathroom the second they were done with their business.

Sticking with the "If you’d like to be outraged..." department, Kid Rock and his girlfriend think lawn jockeys are funny. If you don’t know what a lawn jockey is... um, well... it’s this. Rock’s dad used to collect them when he was a kid, and Audrey bought one down in Alabama a while back. "I bought—you know those lawn jockeys, like the old-school ones?" she told me. "I’m like, screeching across all these lanes of traffic because I see the little black face outside." The one she bought was dressed in Alabama Crimson Tide colors, and then Kid Rock told me that—as a joke—he sent a photo of it to New Yorker reporter Kelefa Sanneh, who did a lengthy profile of Rock late last year. Sanneh, as you may have guessed, is black.

Oh hey, want to see what I looked like during the Speedo contest? Of course you don’t. Tough shit. Here’s a photo anyway. Eat a dick, Channing Tatum. I AM ALL MAN.

One night during the cruise, I came across a dude in a lucha libre mask. "Is that comfortable?" I asked him. "Not comfortable AT ALL," he said.

Redneck Paradise featured a giant inflatable slide called the Hippo that you could climb up and slide down. It cost five bucks. FIVE BUCKS! I was outraged, even though I was expensing that shit. I went to the lady to pay the fee and she handed me reams of paperwork to fill out. I’m telling you, I had to go through less paperwork before jumping out of an airplane than sliding down this stupid thing. So I went up, sat at the top, crossed my legs to make sure I did n’t get a surprise enema, and slid on down. And you know what? The Hippo was worth it. Crazy fun.

Did I mention Kid Rock’s son was on the boat? It’s true! Robert Ritchie Jr. is a 20-year-old student at Belmont University who records under the hip hop handle of Robert James. Kid Rock allowed him to come on the boat if his grades were good enough (A’s and B’s, according to Robert James). I asked him if his dad had ever done anything that had shocked him.

"Um, god," he said, "This must’ve been early in high school. On his song ’Paid,’ it starts off and it’s ’While you’re out gangbanging / trying to catch a murder case / your ho’s on my couch getting fucked in the face’—I was just like, ’Wow. Wow.’ " Nice kid. He was allowed to bring his friends with him on the boat. I can’t imagine how many old ladies they hit on.

Kid Rock was the one who taught Robert James about sex. "They told me I had to have the talk with him at nine," Rock told me, "I was like, ’Are you fucking kidding me?’ We went and bought a book—they had this book called Hair in Funny Places. It’s pretty good. I grabbed a fucking six-pack of Coors Light and some Taco Bell and I was like, ’Alright.’ And he just laughed the whole time."

Getting to Redneck Paradise from the boat isn’t easy. I was naive enough to think the ship would pull right up to the joint. I was wrong. The enormity of the Pearl prevented it getting anywhere close to the cay’s shoals. To get to Redneck Paradise, we were herded bunch by bunch onto tender boats—double-decker transport vessels that chopped through the surf and dumped us onto dry land. As you can imagine, two tender boats crossing each other’s paths happily subjected each other to tit flashes and shouts of "I’M ON A BOAT, MOTHERFUCKER!"

You could feel the ocean in these boats. Aboard the Pearl, large waves registered merely a tickle. The captain told us during a safety briefing, "When you leave the bar, hold onto the handrails," but that hardly proved necessary. While sleeping, the ship’s movement felt like a child gently kicking your mattress from underneath you. The vibrations were subtle, almost personal in a way. Because the Pearl was so large, it gave the illusion that you were walking around on something that rested upon a foundation.

The tender boats offered no such illusion. They tilted and bounced and gruffly slammed against the side of the Pearl. For those of us who were hungover (all of us), boarding the tender was a dicey enterprise. Once I was aboard, the tender pushed away from the Pearl and we cruised through a series of enormous man-made breakers to land at Redneck Paradise. We hit the dock and the tender’s gangplank lowered down at the bow. I felt like I was about to invade Normandy. There was a man sitting next to me on the boat who had webbed feet. I said nothing.

I met a dude on the island named Pat who was NOT part of the Kid Rock cruise. Pat was an Alabama native who has a house on a nearby island, and he could boat over to Redneck Paradise and steal a free concert pretty much any time he pleased. "If you know the right people, you can get in." Well played, Pat from Bama.

Before you get on the boat, you also have to fill out a form that notes whether or not you’ve had diarrhea in the past 24 hours. I bet no one tells the truth on that form.

I had to be a judge for the Lucky Bitch contest, featuring women flashing their tits at the crowd. They gave us placards with numbers ranging from seven to ten. So getting a seven meant you basically got a zero. It’s hard not to feel like a complete prick when you hold up a seven for some poor drunk lady dancing around and exposing herself for the crowd. But hoo boy, even a seven was a real stretch for a handful of them. I tried to give points for passion. One old lady did a topless split. I gave her a nine.

Among Kid Rock’s crew, some people liked the cruise gig and some were less enthused. I asked an audio tech if he was enjoying himself and he said, "NO," and gave me a look that implied that there could be no other answer to the question. Kid Rock’s guitarist, Jason Krause, was ambivalent about the cruise because it forced him to stay in a single place for five consecutive days. "If I’m moving, I can stay distracted," he told me. "And then I don’t miss my family as much."

Shooter Jennings mad out his complementary debit card while on the boat. He said he had $150 on it and blew through it in two days. I don’t know how that’s possible, given that artists were allowed to drink for free. But a skilled drinker like Shooter can manage to pull off such feats without difficulty.

I entered the belly flop contest on the final full day at sea. I failed to make much of an impression because I lacked the necessary girth to displace a frightening amount of water in a single jump. While waiting in line, I spied all the railings and balconies I could climb atop to make my belly flop more dramatic, but everyone else was thinking the same thing. Way in front of me was a giant dude who screamed into the mic, "My name is Pat and I’m goin’ up top!" Sure as shit, he climbed to the top of a support railing (which was clearly not designed to be stood upon) and splashed down. The crowd winced. After that, guys were killing themselves to find something new and high to jump off of. There was a bar a full deck above us, and cruise officials placed security there specifically so that no one would try jumping from the upper level. Apparently, on some older cruise someone climbed up a tower, jumped down, and MISSED THE POOL. He lived, but I don’t think he lived well from that point on. During our contest, a heavyset black woman (yes, there were black people!) took her top off, then slipped on the deck as she was jumping, doing a Titflop. Never do a Titflop. It looked painful.

Any artist on board got to eat or drink for free at the Star Bar, located on one of the higher decks. The Star Bar buffet included melons that had each band’s name carved into it. Real tasteful like.

One of the reasons that Sixthman is a reputable cruise promotion outlet is because they require their artists to stay on board the whole time. Charlie Starr, lead singer of supporting act Blackberry Smoke, told me that when KISS did their first cruise, Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons immediately regretted staying on board and ordered a chopper to fly them off the ship. Sixthman denies that ever happened, but I have to think they had a good precedent for contractually forcing artists to stay on board.

As someone who lives in the liberal douchetopia of Maryland, I forgot that cruise ships are a whole lot more forgiving when it comes to indoor smoking. I went into the casino one night and the low ceilings and massive amounts of smoke created an atmosphere more lethal than the surface of Venus. I damn near passed out. I’m not built to withstand that much smoke anymore. Avoid a cruise casino if you don’t smoke.

Kid Rock was at the casino one night, drunk off his ass. Like, he had clearly been drinking far past the point of actually enjoying it. He was holding onto the craps table just so he wouldn’t fall down, and his people were trying to get him to go back to his room but he wouldn’t listen. We were asked not to photograph him while he was extremely inebriated. You’re meant to see the fun part of the Kid Rock lifestyle, not the messy aftermath.

Everywhere he went on the boat, they had to set up a perimeter around him so that people wouldn’t be in his face at all times. That sounds contradictory to the idea of Kid Rock being on a boat with his fans, but trust me: It was justified. Everywhere he walked, he faced a gauntlet. Kid Rock’s accessibility means people feel more entitled to grope him like a teddy bear. Drunk women tried to step over the velvet rope all the time. The security people were always amiable at first. But on the fifth attempt, they were like OKAY FOR REAL GET THE FUCK BACK. I don’t think Rock noticed any of this. He was just trying to stay upright.

Lots of cruise ships have morgues, just in case, but not all of them. One of the doctors on board told me that, on one of the old ships he worked on, they stored corpses next to the vegetables. Mmmmm... corpse veggies.

Let’s talk about the food situation for a moment. Cruises are infamous for their buffets. Aboard the Pearl, you could eat at the buffet pretty much any time you wanted, or you could make a reservation at one of the swanky restaurants and eat a bit fancier for a supplemental fee. It’s usually worth eating at the restaurants because the buffet food can be pretty dire, even on a high-end boat like the Pearl. (It’s worse on shittier cruise lines. Charlie Starr’s wife had nothing good to say about Carnival’s food: "On the Carnival boats, you’d walk into the buffet and the smell was just... [shudders]".) Here are the most reliable foods to eat at a cruise buffet:

Bacon

Eggs cooked to order

French toast

Hot dogs

Roasted chicken

French Fries

Smoked salmon (they’re Norwegian, after all)

Curries (remember: Most of the crew hails from South Asia)

Ice Cream

DO NOT eat the lunch meats. Seriously. Avoid them. They’ve been sitting out for YEARS. And those ready-made dessert plates in the refrigerated case? They’re almost all terrible. Inconceivably terrible. You wouldn’t think a dessert could ever be, like, bad. Oh, but it can. Same with the pizza. They had cheddar cheese on the pizza. That’s a war crime.

Kid Rock’s girlfriend Audrey busted her leg in a hunting accident (broken tibial plateau was the official diagnosis) and was laid up for most of the cruise (Her joke: "Bob’s ego was all over the floor, and I slipped in it. Whoops!"). And when Monte and his boys came up to deliver Kid’s custom overalls, one of them, Rob, started giving her rehab advice. Rob is a licensed chiropractor back in Du Quoin, Illinois ("I’m not a crazy person," he assured me when we first met), so I’m sure his advice was practical. Still, it was funny as shit to see a dude in a straw hat and airbrushed overalls with a beer in his hand telling a broken-leg victim about enhanced circulation techniques.

For the Kid Rock cruise, there was a tattoo parlor on the boat. I can’t imagine it’s a good idea to have an ink-filled needle plunged into you while sitting aboard a rocking watercraft, but the thing was crowded enough where you had to book an appointment. Tattoo designs included the Chevy logo, if that’s your thing. I asked one lady who was getting hers if it hurt.

"Not anymore."

She had a LOT of tattoos.

By the way, I was told that the hand and upper ankles were the most painful place to get tattooed. I assume genitals were a given.

They had a Kid Rock lookalike contest the last night of the cruise, and there were only three men participating (one of whom really did look like Kid Rock). For the finale of the contest, they had the men sing along to "American Bad Ass" and NONE of these motherfuckers knew the lyrics! You should get thrown overboard for that.

I didn’t get to speak with Kid Rock for the first couple days of the cruise, and I began to get a bit worried that I’d never get the chance. Being a reporter essentially means you’re stalking someone from point-blank range, so I spent a lot of time LOOKING for Kid Rock. One night, I found a deserted upper deck with stacked lounge chairs. If you climbed up the lounge chairs, you could actually look over a railing and see down into "The Haven," the private area reserved for Kid Rock and his crew. It had its own pool. It had canopy beds. It was like a Stones backstage area placed on board a ship. Anyway, I checked this view out a second time with a friend I made on the boat and when my friend looked down into the Haven, someone by the pool TOTALLY caught him staring and we had to run the fuck outta there. I spent the next day terrified that cruise personnel would throw me in the brig for spying on Rock N Roll Shangri La. Seriously, it was nice down there.

I finally made it to the Haven a day later. Once inside the hallowed walls, I was free to hang out and drink as I pleased. But I had sandy feet from Redneck Paradise, so I went to a bathroom in the back of the villa, which had a shower where I could rinse off. After washing my feet, I was unable to turn the shower back off. The fixture was just baffling. I spent five minutes desperately trying to run the water off, thinking to myself, "Great, you finally got in and now you’re gonna flood the fucking joint. Way to go, idiot."

For the cruise, Kid Rock got a personal bartender named Leo who followed Rock everywhere with a cooler and bar equipment ready to go. If Rock needed a beer, Leo had it. Whiskey? Leo had it. A Screaming Viking? Leo had it. Nobody looked more delighted to be running around on a cruise ship handing out drinks than ol’ Leo.

That kid who saw the naked lady in the buffet? I saw that kid later during that cruise rocking a Heat jersey AND a Lakers hat. I nearly slapped him silly. What the fuck, kid? Get it together. That shit ain’t legal.

In my room, I caught the end credits to "Breaking Dawn: Part 2." I’ve never seen any of those movies, but those end credits were insane. It was like this endless curtain call of every asshole who’s ever been in a Twilight film. I can only imagine Twihards breathlessly clapping once Lautner’s credit popped up.

There was a big merch shop on board the Pearl and during the Q&A session with fans, Kid Rock railed on his people for trying to sell cheap flip flops for too much money. He had to take a stand against those flip flops. But that didn’t mean the merch show wasn’t still selling LET’S GET SHITFACED hats for $25 a pop.

I took a tour of the bridge, where the captain steers the ship . They had a big commander chair, like on the Starship Enterprise. I got to sit in it and yell RIGHT FULL RUDDER as loud as I wanted. They let me fiddle with the steering wheel, which was NOT a giant wooden spindle, alas.

"Am I turning the ship now?" I asked the captain.

"No, it’s disabled. You can’t actually steer."

"No?"

"No."

More Kid Rock! Here’s a cruise story from him... "The first year, we were supposed to go to Grand Cayman, and the weather was really shitty, so the captain said, ’We’re going to the Bahamas. At least we’ll be able to get off the boat there.’ He’s says to me, ’Do you want to tell everyone?’ So in the middle of that kick-off show, I scream, ’Does anyone give a fuck if we go to the Bahamas?’ Everyone’s like, ’Woooo!’ So we go to the Bahamas. During the question and answer thing (later on during the cruise), this chick’s like, standing there in a white dress. She goes, ’You know when you asked if anybody cared if we went to the Bahamas? I’m really having a fun time so far, but I had a wedding scheduled in Grand Cayman. My whole family’s down there.’ She’s like, ’I just want you to give me a kiss.’ And I’m like, ’Oh, I guess somebody did give a fuck.’ "

Want to know Kid Rock’s favorite TV show? Of course you do. It’s Duck Dynasty. "You know, it’s cool to see a TV show where they fuckin’—they say stuff; they fuckin’ praise Jesus, the fuckin’ bunch of rednecks, but they’re a very tight-knit family. It’s like, it’s all very positive shit. It’s incredible."

How’s fame, Kid Rock? "It’s fuckin’ awesome! Best seat at the best restaurant. Front row at every sporting event, hang out with the players. But being famous without the money would be a curse."

What about fans who cry when they see you? "I would get a fucking crier at a meet and greet and I would just walk away: Nope. Nothing freaks me out so much as somebody fucking crying. Get the fuck away from me."

How do you like the Lions’ chances this year? "We’re so fucked; they only have three guys: Calvin Johnson, Stafford, and this other dude just have all our money."

And here’s Kid on the difference between actors and musicians. "The difference between the Oscars and the Grammys is the people who win Grammys thank their fans and the audience, and there’s not a single actor, director, or anyone who says anything about the public who actually buys the tickets." This man is RIGHT. Holy shit, actors are the worst. You realize while walking around on this boat that NO actor would dare come this close to the people who revere him.

Rock on buying a trailer outside of Troy, Alabama (a literal trailer): "Best thing I ever did, by the way. Cheap, awesome. It’s all you need. It’s four bedrooms, nice deck. After the tour, we’ll go down for turkey season. In September, deer season’s great, you know." Again, never accuse the man of faking it.

On GQ: "The funniest shit with GQ is when me and Pam got couple of the year or something like that, and it was like, by the time the issue came out, we were already divorced. It was fucking great picking it up. It’s like Couple of the year! It’s like, we’ve already been divorced. They’re like, Fuck!"

On comedians at sea: "It scares the shit out of comedians. Because they think if you do a cruise ship, your career’s over. Right? That’s kind of the comedian world. Washed-up comedians get cruise-ship gigs. And so you try to tell them—you know, like Carlos Mencia was telling me: he’s like, ’I’m already kind of teetering on—you know, I don’t know how long I can keep my success going, so when you asked me to do the cruise ship, I’m like, Oh, I’m fucking done.’ But he was here; he’s like, ’Oh my god, it’s fucking great. I’ll come any time you want me to.’ Obviously he had a great time. But like, David Spade, my buddy—I’m like, ’Just come and do it! It’s a fucking blast!’ And he’s like, ’Oh, man, I can’t do it.’ " If Mencia and Spade don’t think they’re already washed up, I have terrible news for them...

Kid Rock to me, totally unprompted: "You know who you fucking talk and sound like now? I mean, I’m sure you’ve heard this before: Chris Hansen." I had not heard that before.

During the audience Q&A the last day, most of the questions weren’t really questions. A woman named Haley said, "Hey Bobby! I have a vibrator at home with your name on it." And a man named Alan just wanted to thank Kid Rock. "Many of us will never get to live like rock stars, but for these five days, it’s as close as we’ll ever get." Alan, I assure you that it was closer than you think.

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